Politics hates a vacuum. If it isn't filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear.
A new bubble will replace the old one. A new technology will come along to fix the messes we made with the last one. In a way, that is the story of the settling of the Americas, the supposedly inexhaustible frontier to which Europeans escaped.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects on the cyclical nature of technology and society, suggesting that new innovations emerge to address the failures of previous ones.
Naomi Klein emphasizes the idea that each wave of technological advancement often arises as a response to the challenges and 'messes' created by its predecessors. This pattern can be seen throughout history, including the settlement of the Americas, where new opportunities emerged alongside the complications of prior actions, signifying an ongoing cycle of creation and resolution.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a tech conference, when discussing the future of innovation, one could quote this to highlight the necessity of addressing past technological failures.
More from Naomi Klein
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Terrorism doesn't just blow up buildings; it blasts every other issue off the political map. The spectre of terrorism - real and exaggerated - has become a shield of impunity, protecting governments around the world from scrutiny for their human rights abuses.
Everybody that's trying to get anything progressive done in this country knows that the biggest barrier is getting money out of politics.
I think I would say that there is absolutely no way to reconcile an austerity agenda with climate action. Our political class needs to understand that the fight against austerity and the fight for climate action are the same fight.
I think the fossil fuel industry is genuinely freaked out by the combination of the price collapse, the divestment movement, and that fact that renewable energy is getting so cheap so fast.
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If we don't take an approach that looks holistically at the form a video-game platform should take in the future, then we're not able to sustain Nintendo 10 years down the road.
t century, hundreds of millions - and eventually billions - of human beings will transform their buildings into power plants to harvest renewable energies on site, store those energies in the form of hydrogen and share electricity, peer-to-peer, across local, regional, national and continental inter-grids that act much like the Internet.
It's wonderful to move forward technologically, but we cannot forget that we are human beings who thrive on relationships, who thrive on interconnectivity, who thrive on sharing your feelings and emotions.
My dream was actually just to have a computer some day. If I'd imagined that it meant starting a company to sell them, I probably would have avoided the whole thing.
We live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.